My rampant NetNewsWire addiction has me reading several newspapers a day. And the constant White House PR and troop movements accumulate, and it’s everywhere we turn. I’d love to go back to writing about bad movies and iPods and shaved snits and popcorn forks, and frankly I will, but I have to ask: if the tragedies of the 11th spawned legions of warblogs, will the super-inevitable Gulf War II create an army of antiwarbloggers? Cause I’m fightin’ the urge, right here, now. And the carbonized bodies have yet to build up.

Good news for the environment on the hybrid car front. US automakers, concerned about losing a new market to the Japanese, announce new hybrids in the face of obvious demand. Saturn will make a hybrid SUV that gets 40 mpg, and even the army is interested in a hybrid Humvee… That takes half of the anti-SUV argument away, doesn’t it?

Many now believe both the music industry and advertising (scroll down to second entry) are on their way out. These are not the dreamy wishes of webloggers, these are opinions held by those in the industries. I’d add that Hollywood will follow them – in a few years, because of a) film industry mismanagement and b) innovation in consumer electronics, the movie industry will be 1. mostly about video and barely at all about theatrical exhibition, which will make it 2. a smaller industry that will be even more vulnerable to piracy. More on this later if I can get off my ass.

You are the one, Sony. Good points and great links in this piece about the upcoming showoff between litigious, backward-looking “content creators” such as the RIAA and the MPAA, and the necessarily more progressive (and much larger) consumer electronics industry. Sony is increasingly using Linux, and looks to a future where the consumer may swap media files between different clients (TV, PC, handheld) at will.

In response to this thing about RSS and where it should be consumed (browser vs. desktop app), NetNewsWire creator Brent Simmons mentions he’s thinking of ways people could access their subscription list from different machines.

Now I ain’t got no tech-smarts, but could there be some sort of .Mac-style ‘publish to web’ feature in NNW Pro? I can almost imagine how it might be done, and that would save everyone the fussing around with Syndic8 and such. I myself have been dying to assemble a personal portal via tima’s mt-rssfeed, but where does the time go, and I love NNW so much I’d happily pay the (eventual) pro fee for way-cool-out shit like that and save all the fussin’ and a-tinkerin’ for something else.

Joe D’Amato — what the living fuck? That’s got to be the weirdest IMDB page I’ve seen. 40 different aliases, including Sarah Asproon, Drago Floyd, and Chang Lee Sun. He directed such inventively named films such as Porno Holocaust, Antropophagus, Emmanuelle and the Last Cannibals, X Hamlet (let me guess), and 170 some odd others – as many as 15 in one year. Antropophagus has a scene in which a man eats himself.
There’s a good interview here in which he calls himself a “craftsman” and says Raiders of the Lost Ark is his favourite film.

The impending cable news war: Fox News, CNN and MSNBC stock up on rhetoric, “News Alerts” and whooshing sounds as they prepare to head off to war. NBC News “is training about 125 of its journalists to contend with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and already has dozens of journalists in Iraq and surrounding countries.” Reminiscent of the Onion headline in their book, “CNN Deploys Troops to Iraq.” One prof points out that the news networks’ constant warmongering promos add to the feeling that war is inevitable.

During a brief reality TV session y sees “a marine out-performing an ape on a military training course.”

Ah, this is what it’s all about: merging the twin real-life worlds of nature doc and reality show. Animals are real, too! I’m seeing a “King of the Jungle” show in which a bunch of animals are put on an island together and have to vote each other off (or eat each other). Then, “Nature’s Millionaires”, in which animals compete against humans in the field of celebrity trivia. Some kind of animal dating show… “Mating Season”? Or, a bunch of people are sent to an island, one of them is actually a bunch of cats or ferrets in a human suit, they have to find out which one, there’s a good show. Finally, Christian Challenge — maybe Xtian Xhallenge would be more Xtreme — humans and lions duke it out in the XX Arena… last one alive gets $50,000 US dollars or 50,000 zebra carcasses, whichever they prefer.

John LeCarre: The US has gone mad. Similarly, a reprint of Gore Vidal’s lengthy, disorganized, terrifying and to-be-famous-eventually “The Enemy Within” in this past October’s Observer. And here’s a chapter of the Brzezinski book Vidal references.

The details of the dream itself are lost. When I awoke, the phrase “cold-cranking amps” was stuck in my head.

While the content of the dream can’t be criticized I abhor its implications. The phrase is from a Canadian Tire commercial for some dumbass car-starting tool, and the last thing I want is Canadian Tire ads playing in my sleeping brain. We need to oppose rampant commercialism; down with product placement in dreams!

I’ve half a mind to send the Radar Bros album to David Lynch. Listening to it is like taking a long, serene camping trip with an extended family of medievalist psychopaths, which I – I might be crazy but – I think he would enjoy. As the AMG reviewer notes, “never has anything so lovely been so frightening.”

Out on the lake there are children
Drowning with you

This line is what got me hooked, seeing them live when they came on after Destroyer at the Merge showcase in NYC last November. It’s from Rock of the Lake, probably the best song on the album and one that conjured up Lady of the Lake / Sword in the Stone imagery in my impressionable head, imagery that merged with this moment from the Viola thang at the Guggenheim, a merger that haunted me unassumingly.

Then you’ll awake in a room
The light from the pictures you burn will reflect in your shoes

That’s the part I imagine Lynch would like. We don’t know who this rock is, let alone what pictures he burns. Forget that, even; any implication that one is waking in a different place than where one laid one’s head, maybe that’s the essence of it. Slide that in there with their expert, simple countermelodies, the sweet singsong stareaway n’ smile voice of Jim Putnam, the acoustic strum, and sure, the – big Dr. Evil quotey fingers – “slowcore” “sadcore” Floydian deliciousness, and it Lynches me right up, old-skool.

Okay, let me get this straight: the US is not attacking North Korea because they already have “weapons of mass destruction” and an army one million men strong. The result would be disastrous, fair enough. The US, by the same logic, wants to attack Iraq because Iraq does not have such weapons, even though the US will need proof that Iraq does have them in order to justify said attack. If the US attacks without evidence, it “would set a sobering and probably unsustainable precedent” – milder words were never writ. Apparently it gets harder and harder to justify this war and still make sense.

I’ve really done it, I’ve killed the cult thread. Goodbye, GTA googling pirate teens! You can look, but you can’t talk. In other news, mentions of Caesar in the Washington Post (thanks, JP) and Slashdot… too lazy to find the links right now.